Songs

VINYL FORMAT. As is often the case with distinctive endeavors, the creative path of Thomas Dybdahl, the 32-year-old guitarist, singer, songwriter, and native of Sandnes, Norway, has been, for nearly a decade, all his own. On Songs, his U.S. debut, Dybdahl distinguishes himself with fire and finesse. The tracks serve as a great introduction for American listeners to the five albums (That Great October Sound, Stray Dogs, One Day You'll Dance for Me, New York City, Science and Waiting for that One Clear Moment) for which Dybdahl has received steady acclaim internationally and won two Norwegian Grammys. These are the romantic, introspective, out-going, hum-worthy, adventurous tunes of a guy who once, with characteristic honesty, cited the Mozart Requiem as his favorite piece of music but who laughs off any art-rock ideas of literally trying to reinvent the pop song from a classical music vantage point. A flexible, carefully detailed melodicism animates Dybdahl songs like "Cecilia" and "B.A. Part," while other songs, such as "From Grace" and "The Great October Sound," move that same well-founded sense of melody composition into comparatively more ecstatic and less kinetic states. Dybdahl, whose lustrous tenor behaves with an idiomatic ease, does not believe that only anger is energy: "I try to find that force," he says, "that comes from always keeping my calm, from actually holding back. I try to get something out of this implosion - the opposite of a good rock and roll explosion." Songs is an often mesmerizing demonstration of how Thomas Dybdahl does things. It is the sound of how one gifted Norwegian connects with a million other sounds, impulses, colors, and emotions, all assembled with particular sonic poise that always grooves, never overwhelms.